Sunday, October 13, 2013

Stage and Screen

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2006)

So I was lucky enough to go to the stage Lord of the Rings recently. I put it
that way because it’s a major cultural event and I know lots of people would
love to be able to see it. And a feeling of privileged access is at the heart
of theatre. If I try to recall my most thrilling artistic experiences, it’s
likely that as many come from the theatre as from film – usually on occasions
when I was very close to the stage, able to watch every flicker of expression
and drop of spit, utterly enveloped in the mix of rampant illusion and
overwhelming specificity. Then if I try to recall my worst artistic
experiences, a fair number of them involve sitting in not-so-good seats,
fighting off sleep as some lumbering, airless spectacle goes through the
motions. Don’t get me started again on Cats.

Lord of the Rings

Once the unenthusiastic reviews came out,
and I kept reading about its monster length, I actually started to dread LOTR. As we walked to the theatre our
legs must have been resisting us, because the curtain was already up when we
arrived – I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. Eventually we got to
our seats, and by the end of the first act I definitely thought my expectations
would be surpassed. A little bit of that mythical silly name mumbo jumbo goes a
long way with me, but the play seemed to be moving through it fairly fluently,
the first act has a fairly jaunty musical number, and even by the standards of
big budget productions, I found myself captivated by the stage craft. Time and
again, the setting would utterly transform itself (no wonder they took so many
previews to get it all down pat) and I’d think: how the hell did they manage that? I could definitely have used an
instant replay. And the first act has a finale with a dragon which, although a
little hokey, certainly delivers the big-budget goods.

And that’s as good as it gets. The
remaining two acts get weighed down in endless exposition, repetitive action,
boring songs (a shame they passed on the challenge of finding a rhyme for Bilbo
Baggins), and diminishing variations on what had initially grabbed me. The
production has a huge cast, but they’re all swamped – sad to say, Brent Carver
is particularly lost under Gandalf’s beard. To the end, Lord of the Rings never quite gives up the ghost (again, where did
all those sunflowers at the end come from?), but the immense talent and
application seems wasted. For it never comes close to answering this one key
question: what the hell was the point?

Brick

Well, to make money of course, and to prove
it could be done, and because everyone loves a challenge, and maybe it was even
someone’s childhood dream, although if so it obviously took Peter Jackson to
shake that dream loose. None of which is quite enough. It’s philosophically somewhat
interesting too to know that the chicken crossed the road because it was there,
but nothing much is gained by observing the journey.

You can’t assess Lord of the Rings, inevitably, without thinking about the reported
$26 million budget. The play is much more significant as a capital investment
than it is as art, and it’s probably best contemplated in the abstract as a
“Quirky way to blow $26 million,” rather than as something consciously
aesthetic. If you look on it as a matrix of human and logistical choreography,
without worrying about the purpose of all that, it’s perhaps rather wonderful.
Some people will be susceptible to that mindset. But the closing shouts of
“Bravo” from the man behind me sounded awfully isolated.

A few days later I saw the new film Brick, directed by Rian Johnson. Brick is almost the ultimate example of
a film powered by a single inspired idea. It is this: make a classic film noir,
with all the hard-bitten dialogue and world-weary attitudes and femmes fatale
and complicated plotting – really, the entire package – but set it all among high school kids. And
I’m talking about playing it straight – not about a campy Bugsy Malone-type exercise. Brick
may actually be the most focused, single-minded example of the genre in recent
years.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the protagonist, a
senior following the trail of his missing girlfriend, and among other things he
takes more beatings than almost anyone I’ve ever seen outside a boxing movie.
Also prominent in the scheme is a menacing drug dealer played by Lukas Haas,
who runs a local crime ring from his basement, from which he sometimes emerges
to be pampered with cereal and juice by his mother. Most of the film’s laughs
come from such incongruities with adults, but that doesn’t add up to a large
number. And it’s rather miraculous how such an extremely stylized film seems to
constitute a valid expression of the turbulent questing adolescent psyche – it
never pushes the conceit so far that they don’t all still seem like flailing
vulnerable crazy kids. The movie’s sparse, plaintive mood is highly effective
in this regard.

For all that I can’t say I really enjoyed
watching Brick that much – it’s a bit
repetitive, and too abstract to develop much dramatic tension. And I have to
come clean – a lot of the time, I just couldn’t follow what was meant to be
happening. That’s famously true of The
Big Sleep too of course, but that film had a somewhat richer fabric overall
(oh, and Bogart and Bacall). But I do admire it, because it has the feeling of
a film rooted deep in someone’s psyche, executed with immense fidelity to a
vision, and tolerating almost no concessions.

Sophie Scholl: The Last Days

Sophie Scholl was only 21 when she was
caught in 1943 distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in a Munich university. She was
interrogated, sentenced to death and guillotined. Marc Rothemund’s film about
these events (which was nominated for this year’s foreign film Oscar), based on
the actual transcripts, is sober and meticulous, sticking very close to the
actual events with little sense of the world beyond. Julia Jentsch’s portrayal
of Sophie is similarly unshowy, but it’s extremely effective at conveying
Sophie’s sheer inability to process this experience – her consistent grace
seems like part heroism and part bewilderment, although the film subtly maps
her gathering maturity.

The movie has a few conventional ploys,
such as her interrogator’s sympathy for her and – seeming most contrived
perhaps – the way her defense at her trial seems to provoke a silent awakening
among the Nazi functionaries in the audience. That trial by the way is a
hysterical sham that may make your blood boil. But overall Rothemund depicts
this human tragedy as fully as one would want, constituting an appropriately
measured tribute to Sophie without ever coming close to a hagiography. Her
story has apparently been filmed a couple of times before, but this may be a
necessary project every generation or so.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).